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Slow earthquakes are discovered relatively recently, and have been found in major plate boundaries worldwide. They can be as large as magnitude 7, and releases significant amount strain from the fault system. Unlike the regular garden-variety fast earthquakes, they last for long time period (up to years), have slow rupture velocity (~10 kms/day) and follow different scaling laws. Slow earthquakes are generally found in the conditionally stable part of the fault, the transition between seismogenic and the freely slipping zone. In addition, slow earthquakes, in some cases, appear to affect nucleation of damaging large earthquakes in the seismogenic zone; a notable example being the 2011 Mw 9.0 earthquake in Japan. The source processes responsible for producing slow earthquakes, however, remain largely unknown. Moreover, how slow earthquakes interact with their fast counterparts (i.e., fast regular earthquakes) is still enigmatic. In this presentation, I am going to give a global overview of slow earthquakes – the critical observations, current understanding, state of the art techniques, and what lies ahead. |